After many years of collecting and curating data, today
CourtListener crossed some incredible
boundaries. Thanks to a generous data
donation from Lawbox
LLC, our computers are currently adding more
than 1.5M new opinions to CourtListener, expanding our coverage to a
total of more than 350 jurisdictions. This new data enables legal
professionals and researchers insight into data that has never before
been available in bulk and greatly enhances the data we previously had.
This data will be slowly rolling out in our front end, and will soon be
available in bulk from our bulk downloads
page. A new version of our
coverage page was developed,
and, as always, you can see our current coverage for any jurisdiction we support.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this new data. In addition
to being a massive expansion of our coverage, it also brings some
notable improvements to the project:

For all of the new data and much of our old data, we have added star
pagination throughout. For the first time, this will make pinpoint
citations possible using the CourtListener platform.

We’ve re-organized our database for more accurate citations enabling
for the first time the creation of a citation cross walk. We will
soon be releasing an API for our data and when we do, a simple query
for a citation could tell you equivalent citations for that opinion.
For example, a query for a Supreme Court opinion could tell you its
citation in West’s Federal Reporter, Lawyers’ Edition, and a
historical citation, like one to Howard’s Supreme Court Reports.
Similarly, for courts with neutral citations, one could query the
neutral citation and get back the citation in the regional reporter
and state reporter or vice versa. This has long been a pipe dream
for numerous legal professionals and will soon be a reality.

This fills in previously unknown gaps in the data available from
Resource.org. Although it is often considered complete, we have
identified a few small gaps, which this donation has corrected.

We’ve completed a first pass at extracting judge information from
all of the new opinions. This feature is still in beta since our
extraction is not comprehensive, but this feature can be used for
rough queries starting immediately.

We’ve created a massive
database of all
known reporters and released it for free to the public. In addition
to containing all of the reporters we found when working with this
donation, it contains variations for their names as found in our
corpus and in the Cardiff Index to Legal
Abbreviations. This
database can be used in citation finders or other tools, like the
Free Law
Ferret.

We’ve created a new
database
of American jurisdictions. It currently contains 351 jurisdictions
and can be used to create systems such as CourtListener. The data is
not yet complete and we welcome your contributions.

As you can tell, this is a very big day for the Free Law Project and the
legal world —- one that we’ve quietly been working towards for months.
Over the remainder of the week we will be writing two additional posts
about this topic, explaining the design work behind our new jurisdiction
picker, and the process we use to merge new corpuses in with our
existing data.

We hope that these new opinions and features will unleash a new surge in
legal research and technology, and that you’ll help support our
project so that we can
continue bringing these technologies and information to the fore.